The Massachusetts welfare program is unreasonably hypocritical. While proclaiming a commitment to breaking the shackles that have kept the state’s poor at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, Massachusetts legislators have not given society’s disadvantaged an adequate chance to advance.

Creators of the 1996 landmark Welfare Reform legislation set out to radically alter the former system, working to prevent the program’s beneficiaries from becoming dependent on state handouts. As a panel discussed yesterday at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, state legislators have only made survival more difficult for the state’s poor by not counting job training and educational hours as welfare-qualifying hours under the state’s program. Massachusetts is the only state in the union with such a distinction.

By not allowing welfare beneficiaries to count job training as qualifying work hours, the state is in effect entrenching the state’s poor in low-paying jobs with little security. They have not provided significant provision for career advancement among those who economically need it most.

Encouraging education can work in favor of the state’s poor by giving them the opportunity to acquire new skills. Education has been the key to success in our society for the past century, and the state should recognize its extra importance to the disadvantaged.

Legislation to correct the state’s welfare program’s shortcomings has been held up in the Statehouse by some lawmakers and their desires to add marriage incentives to the program. Their behavior is unacceptable. They have tied a real issue of allowing societal advancement to an indirectly related issue that, while in need of further debate, should have no bearing on the work-requirement discussion.

It is time for the State of Massachusetts to show a real commitment to teaching the state’s poor to fish, rather than simply allowing them to sink in the deep waters of unequal opportunity.